Wood Justin N, Glynn David D, Phillips Brenda C, Hauser Marc D
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Science. 2007 Sep 7;317(5843):1402-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1144663.
Humans are capable of making inferences about other individuals' intentions and goals by evaluating their actions in relation to the constraints imposed by the environment. This capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior to draw inferences about an individual's mental states. Presently unclear is whether this capacity is uniquely human or is shared with other animals. We show that cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques, and chimpanzees all make spontaneous inferences about a human experimenter's goal by attending to the environmental constraints that guide rational action. These findings rule out simple associative accounts of action perception and show that our capacity to infer rational, goal-directed action likely arose at least as far back as the New World monkeys, some 40 million years ago.
人类能够通过评估他人的行为与环境所施加的限制之间的关系，来推断他人的意图和目标。这种能力使人类能够超越行为的表面现象，对个体的心理状态进行推断。目前尚不清楚这种能力是人类独有的，还是与其他动物共享的。我们发现，棉顶狨猴、恒河猴和黑猩猩都会通过关注引导合理行动的环境限制，自发地推断人类实验者的目标。这些发现排除了对行动感知的简单联想解释，并表明我们推断合理的、目标导向行动的能力可能至少可以追溯到4000万年前的新大陆猴。
